It was time to face facts: The lower Poudre River was in trouble. And few cared to do much about it.

Rusted, mangled car bodies lined portions of its banks. Rats scurried amid a decrepit maze of beer cans, cigarette butts and worn tires. Garbage stained the river’s meandering path through Fort Collins, a city of 43,000 people anchored by a railroad and a growing university.

It was a startling contrast to the idyllic Poudre Canyon upstream, where clean water splashed on a backdrop of lush forests and green hills.

Almost 50 years later, the memory of the lower Poudre brings Peggy Reeves to a sad place in time.

“It’s hard to look at something that could be a major asset and see it so degraded, so polluted, so unappreciated,” said Reeves, 75, a former state representative, state senator and city council member. “I can just visualize being along the Poudre when it was just … it was a second garbage dump.”

The river — aesthetically and spiritually — has changed dramatically since that time. The car bodies are gone. So is much of the garbage are gone. Industries no longer indiscriminately dump their waste into the river.

“I can just visualize being along the Poudre when it was just … it was a second garbage dump.”

Peggy Reeves

The city owns much of the land along the river where a trail mirrors the riverbank and a whitewater park is planned near Old Town.

Over the last 50 years, the river has earned a reverence among residents who see its waters as the heart and soul of the city of 158,000, and many are willing to fight to never return to the time when the Poudre was a “dump.’’

To understand where the Poudre River is today, we must look at its past. To understand where the Poudre River is today, we must look at its future.

In a series of stories over the next two months, we'll examine the past, present and future of the river.

We start at a time in the Poudre’s history that few remember.

From trash to treasure

A man fishes in the Poudre canyon in this 1987 file photo.

(Photo: Coloradoan library)

At the dawning of the 20th century, pickle and sugar beet factories, a municipal power plant and the city dump bordered the river. It was common practice at the time to use the river for hydroelectric power and as a quick and dirty way to bid adieu to waste.

The riverside lineup changed over the years, but pollution persisted into the 1960s. Multiple sources recalled trucks from Laporte’s Ideal Cement Plant rinsing off in the river, sending toxic water and refuse downstream.

Remember, this was 1969. Nobody recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency was but a twinkle in Richard Nixon’s eye. Tossing chemical byproducts in the river — tossing anything in the river — was perfectly legal.

And if you wanted to experience nature in all its glory, you left Fort Collins.

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The upper Poudre is iced over in this February 1985 file photo.(Photo: Coloradoan library)

In this June 1982 file photo, members of the Northern Colorado Amateur Radio Club set up a water wheel generator in the Poudre in Lions Park in Laporte to power their radios.(Photo: Coloradoan library)

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Reeves apparently didn’t get the memo. She moved here from Illinois in 1966 when her husband received a teaching job at Colorado State University. Then she joined the city’s chapter of the American Association of University Women, which was made up mostly of the wives of collegiate faculty. A year before Reeves earned a seat on city council, a Coloradoan article identified her simply as “Mrs. Brent Reeves.”

She was the chapter’s environmental chairwoman when the women started an environmental study project called “This Beleaguered Earth: Can Man Survive?”

“That sounds so late ‘60s, doesn’t it?” laughs Reeves over a table full of AAUW documents during a recent interview.

Plans for a photo slideshow evolved into a 12-minute video showcasing the degradation of the lower Poudre. The women produced the black-and-white film, which included an original piano score, with the help of CSU students and faculty. They titled the film “The Lower Poudre: A Time for Action” and lugged 40-pound projectors around town to play it for thousands of community members.

A historical map from 1873 of Fort Collins.(Photo: Courtesy of Fort Collins Museum of Discovery)

“It was just a herculean effort on their part,” said Dan Hilleman, a CSU professor emeritus who was involved in the production of the film. “Its relevance today is that, yes, you can accomplish something significant with some collaborative activity. At that point, it was a matter of not the city but local input that started to call attention to the problem.”

As the film made its way around Fort Collins, the American environmental movement was blooming like a rose in the desert. The EPA and Earth Day were born in 1970. The Clean Water Act passed in 1972, making pollution of “navigable waters” — which includes the Poudre — illegal without a permit.

The Colorado Water Quality Control Commission held its first stream classification hearings for the Poudre in the mid-1970s, only to find that no water quality data existed for the river through Fort Collins. So the city worked with CSU to start monitoring pollutants, flow rate and other water data on the Poudre through town.

Meanwhile, the newly formed Poudre Valley Greenbelt Association cooked up a plan for an interconnecting web of trails throughout Larimer County, including along the Poudre. At the time, there were no city-managed trails in Fort Collins or any other place in the county. If you wanted to walk, bike, run or ride a horse on a trail, you had to head to Rocky Mountain National Park or Roosevelt National Forest.

But the biggest thing that happened for the Poudre in Fort Collins in the ‘70s was the creation of an initiative called “Planned Development for Quality.” City leaders later opted for a catchier (and oh-so ‘70s) name: “Designing Tomorrow Today.’’

Peggy Reeves(Photo: The Coloradoan)

People turned out to the community planning forums in droves, ready to voice their opinions about the future of Fort Collins.

Their chief concern — growth. Does nothing ever change? Speakers “challenged the need for Fort Collins to grow by nearly 110,000 persons in the next 30 years,” according to an October 1970 Coloradoan article. But the Poudre came up, too, and among several task forces that sprung from the forums was one devoted to the environment.

This nugget of municipal government history is important because it inspired the city’s first voter-approved sales tax initiative. The 1-cent tax raked in money for more than a dozen projects, one of which included open space land acquisition.

Finally, the city had money earmarked for buying up land along the river.

“Make no mistake: City ownership means control, and control allows clean-up,” said Susan Kirkpatrick, a former city council member and mayor of Fort Collins from 1990 to 1993.

In the city’s first open space plan, 27 pages long and roughly the size of a record sleeve, leaders said they planned to acquire land along the Poudre for preservation.

That was in 1974, the year President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon and “The Exorcist” hit theaters.

By 1992, about 35 percent of the land along the Poudre’s banks through Fort Collins was publicly owned. Today, that portion has doubled to about 70 percent, Natural Resources Department Director John Stokes said.

The remnants of a effluent bridge from the old Great Western Sugar Factory stand tall as the Cache la Poudre River flows Monday, April 25, 2016. The bridge, located along the Poudre River trail between Mulberry St. and Timberline Rd. was used to dump factory waste in a field adjacent to the river.(Photo: Austin Humphreys/The Coloradoan)

Sales tax initiatives benefiting open space acquisition have continued in some form or another since that historic first tax, and some state lottery funds go toward open space and trails projects, too.

In the ‘80s, the lower Poudre stepped out of the spotlight as a six-year fight for federal Wild and Scenic designation grabbed headlines. The journey was fraught with red tape and controversy because the designation would protect the river from development projects like dams — and a lot of people were itching to build a dam on the upper Poudre to store water for a growing population.

Following a lot of local legwork, Colorado Sen. Hank Brown spent three years trying to get a bill for the designation through Congress. President Ronald Reagan finally signed it in 1986, the day before Halloween, at a private ceremony in a Colorado Springs hotel.

Congress would later designate the Poudre a National Heritage Area, recognizing its role in the foundation of water law.

“People just came out really vigorously in opposition to damming the lower canyon. It was almost like shooting fish in a barrel because the Poudre is so loved, and people want it to stay the way it is.”

Gary Kimsey

The designation covered 75 miles of the Poudre, leaving the 8 miles in the lower canyon potentially open to a dam. That brought about a new fight for a new project that included the proposed Grey Mountain Reservoir, a 415-foot dam in the middle of the canyon and a large hydroelectric power project.

A group called Friends of the Poudre fought that proposal until Northern Water eventually shelved it.

“We realized it just wasn’t going to get permitted,” Northern Water spokesman Brian Werner said. “Building a dam on a river in the United States is hard to do.”

Northern Water never applied for a permit. Gary Kimsey, one of the founders of Friends of the Poudre, said it was “really easy” to find support in their fight against the dam.

“The people of Northern Colorado have a real love of the Poudre, especially the lower canyon,” he said. “People just came out really vigorously in opposition to damming the lower canyon. It was almost like shooting fish in a barrel because the Poudre is so loved, and people want it to stay the way it is.”

But love hadn’t yet managed to clean up the lower Poudre. Kirkpatrick, the former mayor, said car bodies and garbage were still a mainstay on the river’s banks in the ‘90s.

“The Poudre River is a mess,” proclaimed a 1994 Coloradoan article that described “discarded tires, cans, hunks of wood and metal and lots of other junk” littering the river’s banks. Another article that year commemorated city workers hauling away 10 dump trucks full of trash from the banks.

American plum blooms along the Poudre River in Fort Collins.(Photo: Miles Blumhardt/The Coloradoan)

“There were lots of Taco Bell wrappers,” noted a volunteer at the 1996 Poudre RiverFest, when 500 people spent the day collecting 325 cubic yards of trash at the annual event organized by the Poudre River Trust.

Over the decades, improvement along the lower Poudre has moved at the pace of the river in winter: Slowly, with fits and starts and dry points.

“You want things to move forward,” Reeves said. “You want it done yesterday. But change just takes a lot of time and effort.”

And today, Reeves can walk on a riverside trail that didn’t exist when she moved here, see children and cyclists and joggers enjoying stretches of land that used to be filled with decay.

That makes her smile.

“The river’s just looking so healthy and great,” she said. “I can still get really excited about it — from the potential that’s now a reality.”

That’s not to say she doesn’t worry. She worries about the pressures on the Poudre, the overallocation of its water, the unrelenting push to store its water for thirsty communities and dryer days to come.

“What’s a river without free-flowing water?” she said. “It’s something you have to be vigilant about. The river can’t speak for itself. Somebody’s got to talk for it.”

The Poudre through the ages

1864: A devastating flood of the Poudre destroys military outpost Camp Collins, causing soldiers to migrate from what’s now Laporte downstream to Fort Collins.

1904: The biggest flood in Fort Collins history wipes out 15 bridges and 150 homes.

1935: During the Dust Bowl, the Poudre nearly runs dry.

1970: The Fort Collins chapter of the American Association of University Women releases its film “The Lower Poudre: A Time for Action,” bringing attention to the plight of the lower Poudre.

1973: Fort Collins voters approve the Designing Tomorrow Today tax, and the city begins to use some of the funds to purchase land along the river for clean-up efforts.

Late 1970s: The city works with Colorado State University to begin monitoring flow rates and water quality along the Poudre.

In a three-part series over the next two months, we take a look at the Poudre River and how it has and will continue to shape Fort Collins through the lens of its past, present and future.

In Part II, we’ll examine the health of the Poudre today and delve into the mounting pressures on its water from the agricultural, municipal, recreational and industrial sectors. Coming at the end of May.

In Part III, we look to the future, evaluating how storage projects, urban development and climate change will impact the Poudre in years to come. Coming mid-June.

Fort Collins resident Steve Holmes maneuvers his kayak down a stretch of the Poudre River in 1995.